74 \VeQ,l GvttJ i tk \1'olÛll :j- hvcrK 1 f ( '-S '\ ! .....- ........ J ........... '""" \ ,/.. - . ---- bðt'ldit 0 [) Þ I G a lJe: ,.. þ e: ,.. IS """'" BANDIT PERFUME in crystal flocons 8. to 40. * Purse perfume spray 7.50. Refill 6. · .. plus tax parfums ROBERT PIGUET PARIS CREATED BOTTLED AND SEALED IN FRANCE ,\ bandit · baghari · calypso he had a paper on the subject accepted by the august Ãmerlcan Journal of Ãrchaeology, whose editors might well ha ve been a bit shocked to learn the age of their erudite new contributor. During the war, Ventris served as a bomber- navigator, and after the war he was In active practice as an architect, with a famIly to take care of as well. Yet he succeeded in his self-imposed task in 1952, when he was barely thirty, and only one year after the publication of "The Pylos Tablets" had at last given him the mass of raw 111aterial he need- ed for a sure analysis. \Vith thIs help from Pylos, Ventris proved that Evans' Linear B script was a syst m of syllabic sIgns that had been used to write an ex- ceedingly archaic form of Greek. 1ore than one book has been written to explain how Ventris did it. Still an- other book would be required to describe the clues that Ventris followed, and also the small but significant earlier contri- butions made by Sir Arthur Evans, Pro- fessor Bennett, and other scholars (in- cluding the tablet-bootlegger, Professor Sundwall, who spotted the sign mean- ing "wine" ), and the important aId that Ventris received from another young EnglIshman, the distinguished Greek philologist Dr . John Chadwick. In the last phase, Ventns and Chadwick worked as partners, jointly signing both the preliminary scholarly paper that an- nounced the great discovery and the big, authoritative book, "Docull1ents in Mycenaean Greek," which was pub- lished in 1956. Yet Ventris alone ac- complished the InItial decipherment, as Chadwick is the first to admit, and even today, when a whole dry-as-dust schol- arly industry is carrying on where Ven- tris left off, it is hard not to feel that there was something magical in this -- young man's solItary feat. Certainly it seemed magical at the tin1e, precisely be- cause it was so totally unexpected. To begin with, no one could have been more surprised than Ventris himself, who had always ruled out a Greek solu- tion until the contrary evidence provided by his "grids" and his other analytic ap- paratus became overwhelming. (His own candidate for Linear B had been E truscan-a gloomy choice, since the Italian documents in Etruscan have long since been read but remain incompre- hensIble because the Etruscan language is still unknown ) As for the rest of the scholarly world, the prevailing view- point may be judged from the comments on Professor Blegen's Pylos tablets be- fore Ventris had deciphered them. One authority suggested that the rude Greek King of Pylas must have hired Minoan } tGY t, Q ð V1JU db wRÞUYVL ð ðo- ,. \ 0- " t>- \ \ t e T oe e T p' G U . . visa fracas PARFUMS ROBERT IN THE USA. 630 FIFTH AVENUE, N. Y. C PIGUET